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Review of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture by Bart Beaty

Beaty, Bart. Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture. Oxford: University Press of Missippi, 2005.

For some time now, the smart money has been on Fredric Wertham
being more than just some quack conservative who hated comic books.
This reader came to Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the
Critique of Mass Culture knowing that Wertham was actually
a liberal who did not advocate banning or burning comic books, merely adopting
an age requirement for those with violent, sexual or "disturbing"
content. Nonetheless, the extent of Wertham's work and
accomplishment, as presented here by Beaty, is surprising.

This is a book that every comics scholar should read and own. It
is a thoroughly researched and contextualized look at one of one of
comics' most maligned figures that simultaneously offers an
interesting re-reading of the history of communication and media
studies in the US. It is not going too far to describe the book as an
apologia for Wertham – Beaty shows how his influence in the budding
field of communications studies was curtailed and ultimately written
out of textbooks, and presents a detailed and rigorous defense of
Wertham's value and relevance.

Beaty describes Wertham as a social reformer unwilling to adopt
the pretense of scientific impartiality, and he obviously shares the
conviction that impartiality is a ruse and is whole-hearted in his
defense of Wertham. This makes the book a little one-sided and allows
for its few notable failings, but is probably necessary if
Fredric Wertham is to act as a corrective to the unfair
caricature of Wertham often put across by comics fans, professionals
and even scholars. In addressing the weak points in the text, it is
important to keep in mind the prevelence of the bias against Wertham.

Fredric Wertham depicts the man as a singular,
progressive liberal voice of dissent against an increasingly
conservative cadre of "New York Intellectuals" selling the idea of an
American utopia produced by pluralistic consensus. The only flaw here
is that Beaty wants to distance Wertham from the Frankfurt school,
insisting on describing Wertham as a "progressive liberal" and taking
Wertham at his word that he is not a Marxist. This despite Wertham's
defense of the Rosenbergs, his expressed desire to write a book
reconciling Marx with Freud, his consistent anticorporate stance, and
his absolute privileging of children's safety over freedom of the
press. Wertham's view of the purpose of government is clearly
socialist-Marxist, though he was probably never a card-carrying Communist.

A more serious concern comes in the way Wertham's arguments
against comics are endorsed. The problem here is not the arguments
themselves, which are convincing enough on their own terms, but in the
way that Wertham conflates the mental health issues presented by comic
books with those presented by racial segregation and the way Beaty
endorses that conflation. Wertham's metaphor for both is
tuberculosis, a disease contracted only by a minority of those who are
infected with tubercle bacilli. This metaphor works in the case of
racial segregation, given that the only "benefit" it provided was
allowing racists to indulge in their racism. But this metaphor only works for comic books if they are only capable
of doing harm – if comic books can also allow for the safe release of
aggressions, teach tolerance or promote reading in general, as some
critics argued, then it is much harder to perform a utilitarian
analysis of their value. Beaty argues against the views of some
critics, most of whom were sponsored by the industry, that comics
could have positive effects but not negative ones. He then falls into the trap of
accepting Wertham's view that comics could harm children, but not
help or heal them.

One thing that emerges out of Fredric Wertham is the
realization that none of the critics of the time were actually reading
the comics in question. Beaty makes it obvious that most of the
critics on both sides weren't even taking a real look at the material.
Wertham did look at the books, sometimes closely, and was capable of
analyzing the images therein in terms of themselves and in terms of
what his juvenile patients said about them. Wertham seems generally
dismissive of the interaction of word and image and of the narrative
content and context of the comics. This makes sense, as critics of
the time inevitably compared comics to print books, and always unfavorably.
As Beaty points out, this fear of popular visual media would soon be
transferred to television. In one of his harsher moments, Beaty
attacks EC Comics editor M.C. Gaines for arguing that the only meaning
in a comic book was the one that was intended in the narrative. Given
that Gaines wrote or adapted many of the scripts for EC, this seems
sensible from his perspective, as does the way that Wertham is mostly
concerned with evidence from the analysis of troubled youth.

The issue of critics not reading the comics has an ironic edge, as
this is exactly what critics of Wertham have done to his books. Beaty point
out that though Seduction of the Innocent was a widely
discussed and excessively reviewed book, it did not sell very well –
people heard it discussed, agreed or disagreed with it and presumed that they
didn't need to read it. One can only hope that Fredric
Wertham will encourage those engaged in communication and media
studies, as well as those studying psychology and modern literature,
and especially those engaged in comics studies, to actually read
Seduction of the Innocent, and other books of Wertham's
as well, such as A Sign for Cain, which argues against
the "blame the child" school of child psychology.

The field of comics scholarship has been waiting for a definitive
work on the historical Fredric Wertham, and Fredric
Wertham fits the bill. Whether Wertham will finally be
acknowledged in the field of communications scholarship remains to be
seen. A caveat is merited regarding the book's conclusion, in which
Beaty condemns the comics industry and comics fandom harshly in a way
that seems scarcely justified by the rest of the book. Nonetheless,
Beaty's partisanship does not compromise the academic integrity of
Fredric Wertham, as his meticulous historiographic
analysis presents readers with the resources they need to come to
their own judgments. After this book, there are truly two Fredric
Werthams – a historical man who fought to curb violence and protect
the powerless in American society, and a mythological beast who simply
hates comics.

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